Maidenhead & Windsor

The Royal Windsor and Maidenhead Borough is armed and ready to face the winter chill with the start of its annual winter maintenance programme – and at the weekend gritters took to the roads for their first "outing" of the season.

The Windsor and Maidenhead council's highways maintenance contractors Balfour Beatty Infrastructure Services are currently on 24-hour standby until the end of March 2008 – and set the gritting wheels in motion on Sunday night to grit the borough's primary routes after forecasters predicted temperatures likely to fall below freezing.

Salting the borough's roads is carried out on a priority basis:

· primary routes which make up more than one-third of the area's roads – covering 145 miles (232km) of the borough's roads with the heaviest traffic – are regularly salted when weather forecasts indicate that road conditions are likely to deteriorate
· secondary routes – seven per cent of the network covering 31 miles (41 km) are salted during prolonged adverse weather conditions. These routes include some bus routes, roads outside schools, hospitals and some minor roads.
· town centre footways in Maidenhead, Windsor, Ascot, Cookham, Datchet, Eton, Old Windsor, Sunningdale and Sunninghill are also salted during prolonged adverse weather conditions.

Cllr Colin Rayner, lead member for Windsor and Maidenhead highways, said this week: "The safety of our residents and visitors – both motorists and pedestrians – is of paramount importance as they negotiate the borough's roads, particularly during the cold days and dark nights of the winter months ahead.

"We are fairly fortunate that in the past ten years we have not suffered great extremes of weather in this area – but we are confident that we are ready and able to cope with the sort of levels we have experienced in the past.

"I would also like to remind residents to make sure their cars are ready for winter driving conditions too." (see the RAC website at http://www.rac.co.uk/ and the AA website at http://www.theaa.com/ for tips on preparing for winter motoring).

Stephen Brown, head of highways said this week: "As it turned out on Sunday night temperatures did not quite fall below freezing, but it is always better to be on the safe side."

The annual gritting programme is monitored by the Royal Windsor and Maidenhead Borough highways and engineering team, with duty managers on 24-hour call using information from the London Weather Centre and their computerised road sensor system to make decisions on when to send out the gritter lorries. The aim is to complete the salting before any roads become icy. Spreading the salt usually takes about four hours from the time a decision is taken.

Full details of all the roads on the borough's primary and secondary routes, as well as the town centre footways on the winter gritting programme can be found on the borough website.

The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead